I asked about connecting a TV via HDMI and explained the problems I was having with my laptop. Dan Armbrust remined me of the function keys that most laptops seem to use for controlling things like this. Looking at them left me a bit nonplussed but I discovered that the picture of a "screen with horizontal lines slash an empty screen" on F3 was relevant. When selected, I saw an overlay menu with five choices. The first choice and default was two screens, one with an X, so that explained the effect I saw. Other choices were the X on the other screen, both screens clear with a caption indicating mirroring, and both screens clear with captions for extending left and right. Thanks, Dan. Problem solved. And thanks to Jon Danniken for the pointer about overscan. As this has an AMD processor, not Intel, that may not help me but it does give some useful ideas. Rene Bertin asked: > Did you get this laptop "bare" or did it come with an MSWin install? > If so and if you kept it, the 1st step would be to boot under that OS > and see how things behave then. The laptop did come with W10 installed but the supplied SSD seemed too small to setup dual boot. W10 is history. I've since installed a nice NVMe drive as a second unit to get more space (amazingly easy to do on this model). -- Dave Close, Compata, Irvine CA "Whenever you have a secret, dave@xxxxxxxxxxx, +1 714 434 7359 you have a vulnerability." dhclose@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx -- Whitfield Diffie